Dealing with the “editors” will be a heavy lift in itself, but the material is a heavy lift. I am currently rereading the “constructive bloodbath” chapter of The Washington Connection, and what grim subject matter. The genocide in East Timor was a “benign bloodbath,” while the simultaneous one in Cambodia was a nefarious one. Closely comparable genocides, which happened at the same time, were treated entirely differently by the media, depending on their political-economic utility. The slaughter in East Timor was perpetrated by an ally, using American weapons and diplomatic support, so when the slaughter reached genocidal levels (at a far higher proportion - the greatest since World War II - than happened in Cambodia), American media coverage actually fell to zero, while the media had a constant drumbeat on the Cambodian slaughter. Those kinds of behaviors inspired Ed to coin a new term to describe the performance: chutzpah.

The genocide as Suharto came to power was a “constructive bloodbath,” as it made for an attractive investment environment for American interests. The media literally treated that genocide in “constructive” terms, calling it a “gleam of light” and other approving terms. In their chapter on “constructive terror,” Noam and Ed showed that far from an unintended consequence, torturing dissidents to the neocolonial order was the essence of the endeavor. You can’t enslave entire nations without resistance, so torture was part of the array of strategies to keep the populace cowed. Torture and kill enough prominent dissidents, and the rest will fall into fear and apathy. Noam and Ed devoted sections of their constructive terror chapter to Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, and they also covered the trends in Latin America before Reagan was elected and the rise of butcher-dictatorships in places such as El Salvador and Guatemala, which they covered in Manufacturing Consent.

I want to cover the Philippines in particular. It was one of the USA’s first colonies, the USA’s actions there inspired Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, and the Marcos regime was notable. Noam and Ed wrote about Trinidad Herrera, a community leader of a slum in Manila who openly defied Marcos’s martial law. She was seized and tortured, including electrodes to her nipples, which was one of their specialties (genital torture was also one of their neat tricks). Her seizure and torture was so high-profile that even the USA had to say something (when goaded into it by global outcry), so she was released (but unable to speak for days). Marcos’s torture victims living to speak out about their treatment was a PR problem, so Marcos’s goons then just began disappearing people. When people are “disappeared,” they don’t get to tell about their treatment. Noam and Ed discussed a similar situation in Thailand, where the authorities disappeared people (protesting students were one of the Thai government’s favorite targets) by incinerating them (while still alive), to remove the evidence. They were writing about the exact situation that Ralph McGehee encountered in Thailand, as he crafted a “gentler” strategy to keep the communists at bay. Ralph did not publish his book until several years after Noam and Ed’s books were published, he contributed an article to Lies of Our Times (LOOT), and it was an ad in LOOT where I discovered Ralph’s book.

A close friend has visited the Philippines a few times and has friends there. He asked one of them what the best times were in the Philippines, and the reply was during the Marcos era. The rationale was that under Marcos, the Philippines made the global news regularly. It was the Philippines’s day in the sun. My friend was stunned by that reply. Today, the Philippines has a leader as colorful as Marcos was. In the 1980s, before I met Dennis, I recall reading about children assassins in the shanty towns of Latin America, who would murder somebody for as little as $5. My friend told me that in the Philippines today, under the “drug war” and other initiatives by the Philippines’s president, hit men working for the government are paid $50 a pop. Maybe that is inflation at work, but also those are grown men who have to feed their families.

As I stated, this is going to be a very heavy lift, to finish Ed’s bio project, not the least of which is the subject matter.

Time to start my busy week.

Best,

Wade

Edited May 21 by Wade Frazier

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I doubt that I can overemphasize that people cannot wake up with my work, or any body of work. People can only awaken through experience. As I work on my Uncle Ed bio project, in which I am also carrying Noam’s spears, of all people, I think of my many years of digesting their work, and I know that if I had not already had my rude awakening on how the world really works, if I ever encountered their work, I wonder what I would have made of it. I had to be made ready for their work before I encountered it. Otherwise, it probably would not have meant much to me. And my work is vastly more radical than theirs is, so much so that I had to come up with a new term for it: epochal.

Theirs are the last spears that I plan to carry in this lifetime. Not only have I done enough of that, there is nobody left in my life that I am willing to carry them for (other than my wife’s :) ). Uncle Ed’s death marks the end of an era for me. I carried Mr. Mentor’s, Dennis’s (with Mr. Professor), then Brian’s, (even Ralph’s a little) and now Ed and Noam’s. That is enough spear-carrying for one lifetime, and I can’t think of people more deserving of having their spears carried. What a blessing to have done that. There might be one last person whose spears I would consider carrying, Peter Ward’s, whose work had a bit to do with how I wrote my big essay. I could not seek a more informed opinion on the first half of my big essay than his, and it was a delightful surprise to have him spend the day reading it, and it told me that I was on the right track. But as much as I would like to help him on his noble mission, I have to work on building that choir. Ed’s bio project has been a detour on that, but it is a labor of love and an honor.

I am constantly approached by the unawakened, who think that they are awake as they drag their baggage to me. IMO, they should not read my work, but search elsewhere. When the unawakened encounter my work, there are a number of possible reactions, but waking up is not one of them. I often see the opposite, as it drives them further asleep, as they build a bunker around their awareness, to more heavily entrench it, as they see their very survival at stake. The sleeping cannot achieve the epochal perspective needed for my approach to work.

These are lessons that I learned the hard way over many years, and they have been teaching me patience, as I walk my own journey. All that I am interested in anymore is for the people I seek to do the work to hit the notes, my big essay is the hymnal, and I am here to help them. I know that I seek needles in haystacks, but they are out there. However, they are not going to be found by chatting up one’s social circles. It won’t work that way.

Best,

Wade

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I plan to slow down on my normal posting while I work on my Ed bio project. Something has to give. My study of Noam and Ed’s Political Economy of Human Rights is for writing this article. My chapter on it in Ed’s bio will also get an overhaul. After that, I will take on Ed’s bio at Wikipedia (after making some changes to other articles), and will likely have to battle the hacks. We’ll see how it goes.

There is a series of concepts in Political Economy of Human Rights worth a post or two. In Latin America, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and elsewhere, the USA installed and propped up murderous regimes that tortured and slaughtered their domestic populations. Noam and Ed described those “leaders” as “denationalized,” in that they had no allegiance to their citizenry, but were completely beholden to foreign interests, primarily American, who funded, armed, and diplomatically supported them. Noam and Ed compared them to Nazi Germany and other fascist states, with one important exception: Hitler at least had allegiance to his “volk,” however extreme his views and genocidal he was to “inferiors” (communists, Jews, Gypsies, Slavs), and he could hold Nuremberg rallies, with his mindless adherents gathering in huge crowds. The dictatorships that the USA installed had no such allegiance to their “volk,” but saw them as the enemy. Those regimes were purely comprised of military elites and a tiny urban elite who were usually landholders that milked the peasants, and their allegiance was to each other and their foreign sponsor. The 80-90% of the rest of the population was regarded as the enemy, and it can mess you up just to hear about their evil activities. Noam and Ed called them “subfascist,” as they did not have the popular support that fascist regimes enjoyed. Noam and Ed ended one section on such activities with this observation on the USA’s popular image in the West:

“It is the ultimate Orwellism that this same superpower is thought in the West to be fighting a noble battle for ‘human rights.’”

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I am finishing my reread of The Washington Connection, and then it will be the second volume. From Ed and Noam’s first political writings onward, they always stood on the highest ethical ground, of taking the polity that they were members of to task for its behavior, and it quickly became a two-pronged approach. In Ed’s first political work (written before Noam’s first), the focus was on American government’s foreign policy in Vietnam, which it had invaded, and Ed noted that its rhetoric was Orwellian from the beginning. In their first (censored) book together, they acknowledged the propaganda role of the press, and in their first books that weren’t censored, they were explicit on the media’s role, and the outlines of their propaganda model are clearly seen.

Their theme from the beginning was the accountability of the American government and their sponsoring interests, and the media’s enabling role. The Washington Connection is a harrowing account of American imperial efforts around the world. Their After the Cataclysm is about reconstructing the imperial ideology that got a dent in it during the Vietnam War era. They repeatedly emphasized that their emphasis was on the behavior of their nation, as it interfered in other nations, from CIA interventions to outright invasions.

There is no way that an honest and sane person could read those books and conclude that Noam and Ed were flacking for the Khmer Rouge. You would have to be an idiot, insane, or a knowing imperial hack to write that Noam and Ed were doing that. It was all about our crimes, no somebody else’s. That is what high ethical ground means. But ever since they managed to publish those books without being censored, the drumbeat lasts to this day of how Noam and Ed were Khmer Rouge apologists. If you ever want to understand the depths of evil and insanity that motivates imperial apologists, digest the literature that accuses Noam and Ed of being Khmer Rouge apologists.

Virtually without exception, the attacks on Chomsky either avoid the entire thrust of his work, or lie about it. Ed was relatively unscathed, because Noam was the most prominent member of that partnership.

Best,

Wade

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As I read Ed and Noam’s early work in The Washington Connection, in parts of it, they throw in a little ironic humor on nearly every page. I think that it must have helped them deal with such dark material, and I think that I can usually tell what was Noam’s and what was Ed’s. In later years, their work was more refined, with fewer ironic asides, and just better writing. Ed often went straight for the humor, such as in his Doublespeak Dictionary (his Great Society Dictionary was a precursor). Ed was a better writer than Noam, IMO, but that is quibbling. They are two of the greatest scholars of conscience that the USA has yet produced.

As they finished The Washington Connection, they presented a prelude to After the Cataclysm, as American writers began spinning the wars in Southeast Asia as a noble cause gone wrong, full of “tragic errors,” not something that was criminal from the outset.

One day, I may have to write more on Noam, Ed, and the JFK hit. I rarely found scholars whom I entirely agreed with on the matter, but there have been some, such as Mike Parenti’s take on it and Peter Dale Scott’s work, although neither one of them dealt with Gary’s testimony. A writer who I think is pretty good on the JFK hit failed rather badly, IMO, in this critique of Noam and the JFK hit. Noam and the JFK hit is quite a subject. Ed gave Gary’s story some thought, and a LOOT issue’s cover story was on the media establishment’s attack on Oliver Stone’s JFK before it was even released. Ed had some good JFK-related terms in his Doublespeak Dictionary.

Best,

Wade

Edited May 26 by Wade Frazier

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I finished Noam and Ed’s The Washington Connection last night, and I am off to reread their second volume, After the Cataclysm. Then I will be writing the Wikipedia article, updating my bio on Ed on my site, and then tackling Ed’s bio at Wikipedia. I have more plans for my Ed bio project, but once I get those little projects done, then it will be on to the long-overdue update of my big essay. It may be the most significant revision that I will ever make or, at least, the most significant that I will make in the decade after I first published it. Again, no changes to the essay’s basic thrust, but I will be putting more meat on the bones, to help my readers attain the comprehensive perspective that is needed for my plan to work.

One facet of my reread of The Washington Connection was realizing how right Noam and Ed were in their writings about communism, especially in Southeast Asia and Vietnam in particular. What Ralph McGehee was finding out the hard way in Southeast Asia, Noam and Ed had discovered through their scholarly work. During my studies, especially my studies since 2007, as I prepared to write my big essay, it became obvious that no life form likes being coerced, and that applies in spades to humans. Nobody wanted to become somebody’s slave, and in Fourth Epoch societies, the idea of slavery is evil, whereas slavery was a hallowed institution for the entire Third Epoch, only ending when the Fourth Epoch began, and slavery no longer made economic sense.

The Han Chinese are to China what white people are to North America, Australia, and elsewhere: invaders who displaced the natives and form the dominant population today. China’s history is a rich one, and during my studies, it became clear that places such as Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia had long resisted China’s domination. Korea, like Tibet, Japan, and Vietnam, had long resisted being incorporated into China, and Korea was known as the Hermit Kingdom. The International Communist Conspiracy is one of the wildest and most untenable conspiracy theories of all time, but it was an official theory of the American government’s for generations, which Ralph discovered was an elaborate lie, used to justify imperial behavior. To the colonized peoples of Earth, communism had great appeal, but what they really wanted was simply freedom from white people’s domination. Their crime was wanting to be free, and the USA has murdered millions ever since World War II, when the international colonial order began unravelling, especially as the UK and France were so weakened by World War II, as the USA became the new imperial overlords.

In Vietnam, communism was part of the revolutionary ideology to throw off the imperial shackles, and throughout the colonized world, it was really about the rise of nationalism, not the capitalist versus communist false dichotomy that the USA sold to its population. The benefits of industrialization were obvious to all colonial nations, and the first thing that they all did after winning at least formal ending of colonial status was attempting to industrialize (but you need cheap energy to do that, which they usually did not have access to). The Soviet Union sold itself to former-colonial nations as a friend who could help them rapidly industrialize, and their motto was industrializing within a generation. But while Vietnam pursued communist ideology and methods, the last thing that they wanted was Soviet or Chinese domination, and the USA’s Big Lie of the Cold War was that those colonized peoples yearning for freedom were Soviet or Chinese pawns. JFK well understood what the colonized peoples wanted and took a very different path, quite different from all presidents that preceded or succeeded him, which was partly due to his Irish roots, as they were among the first peoples to feel the English boot across their necks. JFK was a decidedly reluctant imperialist, which had a lot to do with his murder. All subsequent American presidents have been puppets and know it, although Trump may just be waking up to that fact.

For the peasants of Vietnam, communism had great appeal, and the USA knew full well that if the free election called for, when the French reconquest effort failed, would have been held, that Ho Chi Minh would have won 80% of the vote. So, the USA prevented such an election and continually escalated its tactics of thwarting the Vietnamese desire for freedom, leading to one of history’s most evil deeds, and we even outperformed the Nazis at times. Although Noam will disagree, maybe even violently, JFK was planning to withdraw the American military from Vietnam, and as with Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK’s stance on Vietnam may have been the last straw for those who had him murdered.

So, Vietnamese communism had great appeal to its peasantry. The peasants formed the communist “base” in Vietnam, and the last thing that the communists were going to do was alienate the peasants through violence. They didn’t need to. Perhaps the biggest of the Big Lies that the USA told about the communists of Southeast Asia was that they terrorized and coerced the peasantry. The opposite was true, as Ralph learned in Thailand. One the other hand, the regimes that the USA installed and propped up in Vietnam and throughout the colonized lands were murderous dictatorships with no allegiance to their populations. Ed and Noam called those “leaders” “denationalized,” and their allegiance was to each other and their American backers. There was no way that any of the USA’s puppets could ever win free elections in their countries, and the USA specialized in what Ed termed “Demonstration Elections,” which were free in name only, and were basically PR stunts designed to delude the American people.

The American slaughters of Vietnamese peasants, who comprised 80% of Vietnam’s population, a typical proportion in agrarian societies, reached into the millions. The My Lai massacre was only unusual in that it got publicity in the USA, and in its wake, the USA’s propaganda machine went into overdrive, trying to downplay My Lai as an anomaly, when it was really just a day at the office for the American genocidists. The media not only tried to portray the My Lai slaughter as an anomaly, but they played up Nixon’s “preventing a communist bloodbath” Big Lie for the USA’s presence in Southeast Asia, which brings me to a Wikipedia article which shows what a chore I will have on my hands with Ed’s bio. The article is on the so-called “communist massacre” at Huế, which Ed and Noam called a “mythical bloodbath” in The Washington Connection, which built on their earlier writings on the subject.

The main thrust of the Wikipedia article on the subject is pure propaganda. It is true that during the American bombardment of Huế, which was perhaps the most vicious and destructive of all of the USA’s attacks on Vietnam, and that is saying something, communist battle leaders did execute prisoners as they withdrew from Huế (easier than evacuating them, which is not unusual in warfare situations like that) with credible estimates ranging up to 700, which was likely fewer than the executions committed by the American-led forces after they conquered the city, which their bombardment largely reduced to rubble. Also, the communist military leaders were reprimanded by their leadership for executing prisoners, which was something that the USA never did, at least unless they were goaded into it with the My Lai incident, so they put Calley’s head on a platter while exonerating the system, as usual.

Those “captured documents” from Huế were all either fabricated or mistranslated, such as the one that states:

“We eliminated 1,892 administrative personnel, 38 policemen, 790 tyrants, six captains, two first lieutenants, 20 second lieutenants, and many NCOs.”

Noam and Ed wrote about that sentence:

“…nowhere in the document is it claimed or even suggested that any civilians had been executed. Furthermore, the quoted sentence was taken out of the context of the document as a whole, which had nothing to do with the punishment of individuals, but was rather a low-level report, describing the military victory of the NLF in a particular district of Huế. But the press was too interested in reaffirming the cruelty of the Viet Cong to pay attention to such fine distinctions.”

Noam and Ed wrote that the French word in the document, “diet,” which Americans translated as “eliminated,” had no relationship to violence or executions. The “translation” of the document was a creative writing exercise by American propagandists.

If you read that Wikipedia article, Douglas Pike’s work is given prominent weight on the “massacre,” but he eventually admitted that his job was being a propagandist. He was one of the greatest promoters of the “communist terror” Big Lies, as Ralph discovered. Also, a Rand Corporation study is treated like the definitive document on the “massacre” in that article, when Rand’s role was largely providing imperial disinformation, which Noam and Ed noted in The Washington Connection. So, outright disinformation and propaganda dominates the article, while at least there was a section for “dispute,” which presented some of the facts that make a “communist massacre” problematic at best. But at the top of the article, the “massacre” count is 2,800 – 6,000, which is a wild exaggeration, off by about an order of magnitude.

I have experience with how Wikipedia’s “editors” deal with massacres: if they are “ours,” they are simply erased, but if they are “theirs,” then any rumor will do, and outright disinformation is prominently used.

I could go on about the disinformation in that article, and the jingoists that are readily seen holding forth in the “talk page” on the article, but that is enough for now. When I see tripe like that parading as an encyclopedia article, I know that I will have my work cut out for me with Ed’s Wikipedia bio, which today is basically a propaganda piece, as it alleges Ed’s “genocide denial” regarding Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. In one way, it is a confirmation of what the Propaganda Model predicts for “nefarious bloodbaths,” and when I write Ed’s Wikipedia bio, I will be stating that calling Ed a “genocide denier” is just what the Propaganda Model predicted.

Best,

Wade

Edited May 27 by Wade Frazier

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I am reading Noam and Ed’s After the Cataclysm and performing the very disagreeable task of dealing with their critics. First of all, to call Noam and Ed apologists for the Khmer Rouge is fraudulent, but their critics constantly fall all over themselves to make that bogus claim. To anybody with the slightest familiarity with their political work, it began with the American invasion of Vietnam and was always focused on the crimes of their nation, which is the highest ethical ground that one can stand on. It is similar to Jesus’s admonition to attend to the logs in one’s own eyes, not seek the splinters in their neighbors’. It is all about that rare commodity, integrity. Their censored Counter-Revolutionary Violence was about how the American establishment, including the media, dealt with bloodbaths, based on their political-economic utility. When they finally got something published that was not censored, it became the focus of “genocide denial” claims ever since.

If you are an American (or the USA is your adoptive nation, as it is for Steven Pinker and Ian Morris), the only high ethical ground is to deal with your nation’s contributions to the humanitarian disasters that it has inflicted on the world, especially in nations that it violently attacked, and the USA is second to none in that category since World War II. Nobody else comes remotely close.

So, on the subject of Cambodia, “genocide denial,” and the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, in virtually every instance that I saw, the prominent people charging the Khmer Rouge with monstrous crimes where white people, and almost always Americans. In addition, while they heaped all of the responsibility for the catastrophe in Cambodia on the Khmer Rouge’s shoulders, I have yet to see an instance where they failed to minimize the American role, even though its bombs were devastating that nation, creating two million refugees (around a quarter of the population) by the time of the Khmer Rouge’s victory.

In Ed’s critique of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, he noted how Pinker ignored scholars such as Drèze and Sen in favor of Rudolf Rummel, who hailed from the extreme far right. In Rummel’s work, he put the number of Vietnamese civilians subjected to American “democide” at about 5,000 people. No kidding. That is the “scholar” that Pinker used lavishly in Better Angels, while ignoring scholars such as Drèze and Sen, and Sen is a fellow professor at Harvard and won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

When I see those American experts on Khmer Rouge atrocities, who don’t even acknowledge the American role in the catastrophe or they use “scholars” such as Rummel to minimize it, it can be a pretty sickening experience.

If they could do that to Noam, how hard is it to amass a parade of liars about Dennis? I put Dennis’s name into Google, and the first thing that comes up is Mr. Skeptic’s article, which is actually criminal libel. Virtually the entire first page of results comes from the “skeptics” and other liars. On the second page is my essay on Dennis and his critics. I have yet to see one of his critics ever deal the slightest bit honestly about his past, as he put the world’s best heating system on people’s homes for free. And that barrage of disinformation easily dupes the credulous.

The issue, as always, is about integrity and sentience, both of which are in short supply, and particularly with intellectuals, bizarrely. When I see that, I really wonder if humanity has a prayer. One thing is for sure: establishment science, so-called “intellectuals,” the rackets, and the like are not where the answers will hail from.

How time flies. It seems like just yesterday that the 50th anniversary of JFK’s murder passed, and in a few days, the 50th anniversary of RFK’s murder will pass. Both were taken out in spook operations that were covered up by the official “investigations.” I am planning to write on Noam and JFK in my new comprehensive thread. Noam got that one wrong, IMO. Mike Parenti’s take was the best from the Left, and Ed also entertained the idea that JFK was taken out by the spooks.

Best,

Wade

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I am about halfway through my reread of Noam and Ed’s After the Cataclysm, and I am in their Cambodia chapter. I first wrote about it nearly 20 years ago, and it is still one heck of a read. After all these years, it is really something to read Ed and Noam’s work, and then read the hack attacks on it. For instance, the first paragraph of After the Cataclysm states:

“We will consider the facts about postwar Indochina insofar as they can be ascertained, but a major emphasis will be on the ways in which these facts have been interpreted, filtered, distorted or modified by the ideological institutions of the West.”

They really could not have been more explicit, and they repeated that emphasis several times in After the Cataclysm, but that did not prevent a major international campaign by the world’s “intellectuals” to lie about what Noam and Ed wrote.

The full title of their book is After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, and the part about reconstructing imperial ideology was explicit in the book and was a theme of theirs ever since. After the war was over, the spin doctors in the USA began framing the USA’s genocide as “blundering efforts to do good” and other outright lies. What the USA did was never a crime, but a “tragic error” in bringing the light to the world with its bombs and murders.

Noam and Ed made astute comparisons of the USA’s apologetics with Nazi Germany’s. Hermann Goering, while being interrogated at Nuremberg, said that the genocide of the Jews was not a crime, but a “vast political blunder; many would have made good nationalists and joined in the Liquidation of the communists. If only Hitler had not confused the issues….” Klaus Barbie, during his comfortable “retirement” in Bolivia, after rendering his heroic service to U.S. intelligence, like Gehlen and so many others, said about the Jewish genocide, “the mass killings of Jews constituted a grave error. Many of the SS officers believed that the Jews could have been put to better use building roads to facilitate the advance of our troops.” They weren’t crimes, but mistakes.

At the Dachau museum, which I visited in 1974, the Washington Post quoted the museum’s director as saying about the corporate use of slave labor, “It is a guilt never acknowledged here and rarely spoken about in our history books.”

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Orwell called orthodox thinking a form of unconsciousness, and wrote (in his censored preface to Animal Farm) that trading one flavor of Kool-Aid for another was not exactly “progress.” The mind-boggling part of that is that the so-called “smart” are often the most trapped in their ideological cages. I saw it many times with Level 3s, and it has really been something to study for Ed’s biography project, as I will likely be doing for years. In The Political Economy of Human Rights, which was a prelude to Manufacturing Consent, Noam and Ed were crystal clear on how the propaganda system works, and the response to their work proved their point. Initially, their work was censored, in one of the most outrageous instances of censorship in the 20th century. That did not work, and The Political Economy of Human Rights was their censored version beefed up by nearly an order of magnitude.

Their thesis and support for it were undeniable, so their critics completely ignored the thrust of their work and tried to twist it into their being apologists for Pol Pot, which was the furthest thing from what their work was about. Noam and Ed knew it was coming and tried to forestall that attack, but it was a futile effort, as the propaganda barrage overwhelmed their arguments in the public eye. Ed’s current Wikipedia bio is Exhibit A on how the propaganda system works, and we’ll see how my upcoming battle with the hacks goes. Academics and professors led the attacks on Noam and Ed, incredibly. A five-year-old could see how irrational their attacks were. But all manner of pundit attacked Noam and Ed with outright lies and obfuscations, and never addressed their thesis or evidence, as they tried mightily to twist their work into something unrecognizable to those familiar with Noam and Ed’s work. It was beyond insane, but as Ed and Noam wrote, those irrational pundits were usually not intentionally lying (although many did), but were incapable of being rational when their self-serving faith was challenged. While that may seem to absolve them of responsibility, it also brings up Brian’s question: are we a sentient species? It is just more proof of my journey’s primary lesson, which I learned 30 years ago. Dennis was arrested 30 years ago this month, and then my nightmare truly began. When the dust settled a couple of years later, I had been radicalized and would never see the world the same way again, and it prepared me for work such as Noam and Ed’s.

This insanity can be seen in all manner of ideological addiction, and as Noam stated many times, a good propaganda system will have the appearance of rigorous debate, but only within the narrow confines of self-serving assumptions (that are clearly false, to anybody not drinking the Kool-Aid). As the Nazis did, the American pundits, virtually without exception, framed our evil activities in Southeast Asia as “tragic errors” and “blundering attempts to do good,” when the facts (always suppressed or ignored) show that that was the furthest thing from the motivation of the war planners and others. Imperialism has always been, and always will be, evil in its motivation. It is all about conquering, plundering, and exterminating distant peoples for the benefit of the imperial capital and the “settlers.” Academics such as Ian Morris argue that those evil activities have made the world safer and more prosperous, as Morris cheers on the empire from his cushy berth. What an argument to make, and what a prescription for the future (shudder). There is a different path to take, but time is short.

Best,

Wade

Edited June 8 by Wade Frazier

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Before I write the Wikipedia article on Noam and Ed’s first books that weren’t censored, I’ll be revising Ed’s bio a little, especially the chapter on those books. I expect that I will be spending this summer’s “spare” time on those tasks, as I write Ed’s bio at Wikipedia, to replace the hack version, and then the battles will likely begin. I spent time today beefing up Ed’s quotes, for his and Noam’s writings on Cambodia and the propaganda system. I have less than 100 pages left of my reread of their 750-page version of their originally censored work, and I then will get to some serious writing.

One aspect of this task that is very pleasant, so to speak, is digesting the work of two brilliant scholars of high compassion and integrity, as they discuss issues of great import that have only received the propaganda treatment in the American media. Noam has been the world’s leading intellectual for the past 50 years for good reason, and Ed was no slouch. Their work invites deep thinking, in great contrast to the comic book version that the media presents, which on the subject of Cambodia was eerily similar to Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate. Comparing their work to what the hacks said their work was about is like exploring two different worlds.

It is like when I would read media articles about us, which were a series of lies and misdirections so great that if I didn’t know who they were writing about, I would have had no idea who they were writing about. Dennis is the greatest human being that I ever met, and the media invariably portrayed him as the criminal of the century. Noam and Ed were similarly attacked. That is how the saints fare in our insane world.

Best,

Wade

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After the Cataclysm has been posted to the Internet (and the link was recently erased from the Wikipedia article, hmmm, I’ll have to look into that when I write the article), and I am sure that Ed would not have minded, and I am sure that Noam doesn’t. I am almost finished with the reread, and then will be updating Ed’s bio and writing that Wikipedia article. I want to briefly cover some aspects of that book that are ignored by its assailants.

Back in Ed’s earliest political writings, about Vietnam, he noted the canard of the USA’s trying to prevent a communist bloodbath. The USA slaughtered millions to “save” millions. Strange logic. It was an entirely false rationale, but all imperial rationales are false, and knowingly false by the people concocting them. Every crime has some flowery justification invoked by the perpetrators. If anything can be called human nature, that is it, as humans can justify anything, even eating their children.

So, no communist bloodbath happened in Vietnam, but one happened in Cambodia. Ed and Noam discussed an aspect of what happened in Cambodia that has always been ignored in imperial apologetics, which was not only how the bombing of Cambodia, especially at its climax in 1973, brought the marginal Khmer Rouge into power, but it also created the brutal conditions among Cambodia’s peasantry to incite what became a genocidal bloodbath, mainly of Cambodia’s city dwellers, who were primarily the colonial elite. Noam and Ed discussed an idea raised by others, that Nixon and Kissinger intentionally inflicted a firestorm of bombing to create exactly what happened. A communist bloodbath was not going to happen in Vietnam, as Nixon constantly invoked, but if they bombed Cambodia to dust, then maybe they could make their prophesized bloodbath happen in Cambodia, and it worked, so the imperial class could retroactively justify their immense crimes. It also had the virtue of preventing a good example of socialism that might have inspired the peasants of other American client regimes, such as in Thailand, to overthrow their brutal rulers.

Of course, the actual murders by the Khmer Rouge were far less than the propagandists stated (far more were the responsibility of the USA’s epic bombing), although they were plenty. However, as a proportion of the population, the simultaneous one in East Timor, inflicted by Indonesia, with American weapons and diplomatic support, was greater, the greatest since World War II, was completely blacked out in the USA, while what happened in Cambodia was covered by the American media with a constant drumbeat of genocide, and that was the entire point of Noam and Ed’s book: how the media enables imperial behavior. Their writings in The Political Economy of Human Rights matured into Manufacturing Consent a decade later, which was their most famous work, both jointly and individually, and Ed was the primary author. Ed developed the Propaganda Model and wrote the chapters before the Indochina wars, and Noam wrote the Indochina chapters.

Ed and Noam also wrote at length, particularly in Manufacturing Consent, that after the murderous Khmer Rouge were overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion, the USA supported Pol Pot for the next dozen years because he was an enemy of Vietnam, as he terrorized Cambodia. It would be as if Hitler’s genocide of the Jews was retroactively used to justify the American invasion of Europe, but Hitler fled to South America and was supported in style by the USA ever since, because he still had political-economic utility for killing Jews. It was Orwell to the extreme and continues to this day, with the absolutely insane attacks on Noam and Ed for their Cambodian writings, among other hack activities.

Best,

Wade

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Sorry to hear of your loss. Yes, your nephew is doing fine, and he had his reasons for leaving this world. In this world, everybody lives to a hundred and more, and it is one of the stars that I steer by. No more dying young, no more living in scarcity, misery, and fear, etc.

I hear you that free energy and the Fifth Epoch may seem to be the easy way out, but the masses have never helped a new Epoch come into being. It was always a relative handful, and even a literal handful sometimes. Only the rise of industrialization ended chattel slavery as a hallowed institution. And what did that first industrialized nation do? It used its advantage to enslave the world in a new way, and virtually everybody in England played along. The imperial ideology of England is alive and well today, as the USA plays imperial overlord, with the ideological summersaults that people such as Ed and Noam wrote about so astutely.

IMO, the point of being a sentient species is to raise our awareness, and each one of us reaps what we sow, and I will wax mystically for a moment. In The Aquarian Gospel, Jesus healed somebody, a blind man, as I recall, and his followers said that the man’s blindness reflected karma, as he paid his soul’s debts, and Jesus was removing the man’s karma. Jesus replied that nobody could pay another’s karma, but that healing the man made him more capable of meeting his karma.

One of the most common objections to free energy and the Fifth Epoch is that life is supposed to be hard and full of tears, so free energy and abundance is wrecking “God’s plan” for humanity. That is just an addiction to scarcity talking, IMO. The same pointing to “God” to justify human misery was used by antebellum southerners to justify slavery, clear until the Civil War. To me, all that it means is that people have always been creatures of their Epochs, unable and unwilling to see beyond them, as their immediate self-interest formed the horizon of their egocentric awareness. Just as Fourth Epoch people could afford to have a conscience as far as slavery was concerned, in the Fifth Epoch, people will easily see the evils of imperial ideology, in all of its guises, capitalism, nationalism, race, and other aspects of our world will cease of have meaning, and Fourth Epoch practices will be looked back on in horror, and people will marvel at how primitive this Epoch was, as its denizens reveled in how “advanced” they were.

People are addicted to their survival mechanisms in a world of scarcity, and won’t wake up until scarcity ends, and only free energy can do that. It was like that for all Epochal Events, and I don’t see any reason why it would be different this time, even though we have shows such as Star Trek to give us hints.

Then I will begin plunking along on my long overdue update of my big essay. I expect that process to take a year or so, of my “spare” time. It will be a significant update. Maybe I’ll get lucky and it will only take a few months. We’ll see. Then I am going to engage in some more visibility work, do some interviews, etc.

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My post this summer will include drafts of my writings on Ed and Noam. I am far from finished, but this is a draft of my revision of The Washington Connection, which I worked on this morning:

The Political Economy of Human Rights

Herman and Chomsky’s first uncensored collaboration was “Saigon’s Corruption Crisis: The Search for an Honest Quisling”, published in 1974. The article discussed the American government’s intractable problem in Vietnam: finding a puppet who was not corrupt, in order to change the image of the regimes in Vietnam and renew generous funding from Congress.

In 1977, previews of Chomsky and Herman’s next collaboration appeared in various publications. One was a preview of the first two chapters of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. Herman’s writings were published in Monthly Review over several decades. Another was on the American media’s treatment of Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, when little confirmable information on Cambodia’s situation was available to the West.

In 1979, Chomsky and Herman published the two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights; The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism was the first volume, and After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology was the second. The combined works greatly expanded on CRV. The preface of The Washington Connection established the theme of those two works, which contrasted the facts of the United States’s international behavior with the popularly held beliefs about them in the United States.

The Washington Connection

The facts asserted by the authors were that the United States had “organized under its sponsorship and protection a neocolonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite.”

The beliefs asserted by the authors, which they called an “ideological pretense,” were that the “United States is committed to furthering the cause of democracy and human rights throughout the world, although it may occasionally err in the pursuit of this objective.”

The authors noted that between 1960 and the publication of their work in 1979, more than 18 Latin American governments had been subjected to military takeovers, and the United States was essential to the overthrow process in all of those nations. The authors wrote that torture had been no more than a historical curiosity in recent centuries, but suddenly flourished in the “free world” while it had simultaneously declined in the Soviet domain after Stalin’s death.

The inner cover of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism presented a diagram of nations that routinely tortured their citizenry during the 1970s. That diagram listed the 35 nations that practiced torture on an administrative basis, and 26 (74%) of them were client states of the United States. The diagram also presented the amount of military aid provided by the United States to those torturer regimes from 1946 to 1975, which amounted to many billions of dollars, as well as how many of those nations’ military and police personnel were trained by the United States from 1950 to 1975, a count which exceeded 200,000 people. The authors noted that 35,000 Latin American officers had been trained at the School of the Americas, which was known as the “school of coups.” The School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, became infamous for running a torture school, and long after The Washington Connection was published, the Pentagon declassified some of their training manuals, which advocated torture and described torture techniques.

In The Washington Connection, Chomsky and Herman argued that the term “terror,” as used by the American media, was a political construct applied only to violence committed by marginal groups, even American students who protested the Vietnam War, while state terror, which was immensely more destructive, was defined away as not being terror at all, but was described by euphemisms such as “police action,” “protective action,” and similar terms, even while the Cuban and Cambodian governments’ violence was deemed “terroristic.”

Chomsky and Herman surveyed the CIA’s methods of subversion, including:

Assassinating foreign heads of state;

“Direct conspiracies with terrorists, mercenaries or (usually) military factions within a country to disrupt or overthrow a government in disfavor”;

“Political bribery and funding foreign politicians”;

Propaganda, in a “wide variety of forms”;

Organizing and funding demonstrations;

Actual information collection, which was its primary official function in its charter, but it routinely provided that information to those torturer regimes and the CIA’s proxies for harrying and overthrowing governments.

A theme throughout The Washington Connection was that those activities had the singular purpose of providing a favorable investment climate for American interests, primarily transnational corporations. Torture, slaughter, even genocide, and terror was performed with the objective of cowing a populace into apathy and submission so that foreign interests could plunder the labor and natural resources of those subject nations.

A generation later, John Perkins described those activities from the inside, as a member of a “middle management” that described themselves as “economic hit men,” who openly acknowledged among themselves that their purpose was to plunder the labor and resources of subject nations. When people such as Perkins failed to get foreign leaders to sell out their nations to transnational corporations, then the “jackals” (covert operatives, usually CIA contract agents) were sent in, often to assassinate foreign heads of state. Perkins had clients that were populist leaders of Panama and Ecuador, Omar Torrijos and Jaime Roldós, and after the economic hit men unsuccessfully tried to get them to sell out their nations to the “corporatocracy,” both men soon died in aircraft “accidents” that Perkins strongly believed were “jackal” operations.

Chomsky and Herman wrote that the CIA-enabled Latin American dictatorships had similarities to Nazi Germany, not the least of which was the CIA’s use of Nazis, particularly those who fled to Latin America after World War II, often with American assistance and protection, but with some important exceptions. Anti-Semitism was rarely evident in the ideology of those Latin American dictatorships, although Argentina was an exception, with its long history of anti-Semitism. More importantly, unlike European fascism, the Latin American variant had no popular support. The regimes were “denationalized” and had no allegiance to their nations’ masses, but instead were beholden to their foreign sponsors, so they treated their domestic populations as their enemies. Accordingly, the authors termed those regimes “subfascist.” The authors noted that the phenomenon of American-supported subfascist regimes was far from confined to Latin America, but was the typical situation in American client states globally.

In The Washington Connection, Chomsky and Herman described how the American mass media operated, and included a brief discussion of the features of what became their Propaganda Model, which was further developed in their Manufacturing Consent. In an early example of the media’s double standards that became a regular feature of Chomsky and Herman’s media analytics was a section of The Washington Connection titled, “Cambodia: Why the Media Find It More Newsworthy Than Indonesia and East Timor.” Chomsky and Herman explicitly made their arguments about the Cambodian slaughter in the 1970s; they were framed in the American media’s treatment of it, as they stated:

“Even today, as regards East Timor, where our brutal Indonesian satellite (authors of the 1965-1966 butcheries) have very possibly killed as many people as did the Khmer Rouge, there is a virtually complete blackout of information in the Free Press. This is a bloodbath carried out by a friendly power and is thus of little interest to our readers. It is a ‘benign bloodbath’ in our terminology.”

In The Washington Connection, Chomsky and Herman provided more examples of their framework of constructive, benign, nefarious, and mythical terror and bloodbaths, several of which were not in CRV, and they considerably expanded on their discussions in CRV. The terror and bloodbaths discussed in The Washington Connection included:

Benign and Constructive: American client regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia;

Benign: East Pakistan, early 1970s; Burundi, 1972; Indians of Latin America, particularly the genocide of the Aché of Paraguay, where the effort was led by American missionaries, enabled by the State Department and other American government agencies; and a lengthy discussion of the Indonesian invasion and aftermath in East Timor, which was the greatest proportional genocide of an ethic group since World War II;

Constructive: Indonesia, 1965-1969; Thailand and the Philippines, post-World War II to the 1970s; Dominican Republic, from the 1965 American invasion to the 1970s, Latin America in general, from the American overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954, to the mid-to-late 1960s epidemic of overthrown governments, to the subfascist terror regimes in the 1970s;

Nefarious and Mythical: Vietnamese land reform in the 1950s and the Huế “massacre” in 1968.

Chomsky and Herman provided voluminous details, context, and dry humor regarding those events. For instance, in the early days of Marcos’s subfascist terror regime in the Philippines, they routinely tortured dissidents, such as Trinidad Herrera, who organized protests in a squatter community near Manila, but was released after a tremendous international outcry that finally spurred the State Department to intervene to obtain her release. The testimonies of Marcos’s torture victims became a public relations problem, so the Marcos regime graduated to a “more advanced subfascist process” in which dissidents then began simply disappearing, never living to describe their treatment. The authors described a similar process in Thailand, in which “disappeared” dissidents (such as protesting students) were disposed of by incineration, even while the victims were still alive. Chomsky and Herman repeatedly noted that after successful constructive terror, American investment would pour into subject nations, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, as those nations became investors’ paradises.

Chomsky and Herman, in a preview of Manufacturing Consent, described the American media’s enabling performance of those activities, such as the New York Times’s performance regarding the East Timorese genocide, particularly that of its Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, Henry Kamm, who uncritically promoted the Indonesian government’s propaganda as it slaughtered the East Timorese in its unprovoked invasion. As the genocide in East Timor reached its peak, the American media went completely silent, which Chomsky later said reached the level of actual complicity in genocide.

In an early example of the pairing analysis of the media that Herman and Chomsky made famous in Manufacturing Consent, they noted that the trial of Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky received more American media coverage in 1978 than the collective coverage of several thousand murders inflicted by Latin American client regimes in the same year.

Chomsky and Herman regularly noted the media’s irrationality in its reporting, such as the logical fallacy known as false alternatives, in which people who opposed the American invasion of Vietnam on principle were called “supporters of Hanoi.” The authors described at length American president Jimmy Carter’s hypocrisy as a “human rights” advocate when it came to how American client regimes treated their domestic populations, such as in American-supported dictatorships in Nicaragua and Iran, as well as Carter’s presiding over the greatest proportional genocide since World War II, as his administration renewed weapons sales to Indonesia when it began running out of bullets. The authors wrote that the United States was far from alone in supporting the Indonesian genocide in East Timor, as several Western nations provided various forms of assistance, including France and notably the United Kingdom; British Aerospace sold $25 million of counterinsurgency attack aircraft to Indonesia in 1978, which would have only been used on East Timor at that time. Western oil companies lined up in the wake of the invasion to negotiate oil exploration rights in Timor Gap.

Chomsky and Herman wrote at length about the USA’s operations in Vietnam, including mass murder programs such as Operation Speedy Express and the Phoenix Program. Details of the American operations were provided by examples such as the Congressional testimony of K. Barton Osborn, who:

“served in a covert program of intelligence in Vietnam, not only testified to a wide variety of forms of torture used by U.S. and Saigon personnel, but also made the startling claim that ‘I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC [NLF] suspect who ever lived through an interrogation in a year and a half, and that included quite a number of individuals.’”

Vietnamese land reform in the 1950s was a dismantling of an economic order that exploited peasants, as had been happening throughout the Third World since World War II, but it was also an endemic issue in agrarian societies, going back to the first civilizations. The most credible estimates were that the communist leadership in North Vietnam executed as many as two thousand people during its land reform activities. However, in late 1969, Nixon announced that 50,000 people had been executed by North Vietnam’s communist leadership. Several months later, Nixon said that the number was “hundreds of thousands,” and a month later, when huge protests were held across the USA in response to Nixon’s announcement that the USA was bombing Cambodia, Nixon announced that “a half a million, by conservative estimates…were murdered or otherwise exterminated by the North Vietnamese.” Nixon’s lies were made to bolster his claims that the North Vietnamese would massacre millions of South Vietnamese if they ever ruled over South Vietnam, and preventing a communist bloodbath became his rallying cry. Vietnamese land reform became one of Chomsky and Herman’s mythical bloodbaths.

Nixon’s lies about Vietnamese land reform and warnings against communist bloodbaths were part of a longstanding ideological construct that the USA was preventing or containing communist “aggression.” In that framework, the USA was never the aggressor, but was responding to or preventing communist aggression. That stance became known as “containment,” and was the USA’s official rationale for the Cold War. Herman and Chomsky spent a good deal of their political writings demonstrating that the “containment” policy was pure propaganda. The USA never felt threatened by communist expansion from the Soviet Union or China. Peasant nations freeing themselves from centuries of European colonial domination would no longer be subjected to capitalist-imperialist exploitation, and that was the real threat that the USA addressed with its foreign policy.

In his Beyond Hypocrisy, Herman wrote about the fictions that the containment policy was founded on, and he analyzed National Security Council Report 68 (“NSC-68”), prepared just before the Korean War in 1950. NSC-68 was a planning document for American leadership, and its author, Paul Nitze, advised the Reagan administration more than 30 years later. NSC-68 frankly recognized Soviet weakness, as it recovered from tens of millions of deaths in World War II. NSC-68 made explicit plans to subtly attack the Soviet Union, first by stripping away its satellites, and then to subvert the Soviet Union itself. NSC-68, like the Reagan administration’s “Defense Guidance, 1984-1988” report, authored by the Pentagon, openly acknowledged Soviet weakness and how to aggressively exploit it.

NSC-68, declassified in 1975 by Henry Kissinger, acknowledged that in order to subvert the Soviet Union, the USA needed a large military and mobilized public. Herman wrote:

“Doublespeak embedded in a convenient matrix of anticommunist ideology was essential, as the U.S. establishment was obliged to pretend (or internalize the belief) that the huge global expansion of the U.S. political economy on which they had embarked was ‘defensive’ and responsive to some external threat; that we were ‘containing’ somebody else who was committing ‘aggression’ and threatening our ‘national security.’

“The words and phrases ‘defense,’ ‘containment,’ ‘aggression,’ and ‘national security’ are core items of the doublespeak lexicon, essential ingredients of the ink squirted out by imperial cuttlefish.”

Nitze was a leading foreign policy hawk, and the leading dove of the early postwar years, George Kennan, authored Policy Planning Study 23 (“PPS-23”) for the U.S. State Department in 1948, the year after the USA renamed its War Department to the Defense Department. PPS-23 was declassified in 1974. Kennan made infamous observations in PPS-23, including:

“Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

“…We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and - for the Far East - unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

Kennan was the author of the USA’s “containment policy,” but Kennan wrote in 1985:

“In no way did the Soviet Union appear, at that moment, as a military threat to this country. The Soviet Union was utterly exhausted by the exertions and sacrifices of the recent war.”

In the 1960s, Kennan lectured on the idea that when the USA created NATO:

“they had drawn a line arbitrarily across Europe against an attack no one was planning,” and Kennan admitted that there was really “nothing to contain.”

Herman and Chomsky regularly wrote about American policymakers in the early postwar years and what the real game was, which they openly admitted in their top-secret planning documents.